Panorama VM is misaligned.

[plim01]

Hi everyone,

I have installed the Panorama from the OVF file that Palo Alto provide. But when the VM is deployed, it is misaligned. Did anyone solve this issue already?I have tried to align it with MBRAlign in ESX, but after that the alignment the VM will not startup anymore.

Does anyone have any idea how to solve this?

[ericgearhart]

To clarify he means the OVF geometry doesn't align properly when he deploys the VM onto his VMware ESX host... this can have an impact on I/O performance

In a SAN environment, the smallest hardware unit used by a SAN storage array to build a LUN out of multiple physical disks is a called a chunk or a stripe. To optimize I/O, chunks are usually much larger than sectors. Thus a SCSI I/O request that intends to read a sector in reality reads one chunk.

On top of this, in a Windows environment NTFS is formatted in blocks ranging from 1MB to 8MB. The file system used by the guest operating system optimizes I/O by grouping sectors into clusters (allocation units).

Also, operating systems on x86 architectures create partitions with a master boot record (MBR) that consumes 63 sectors. This is due to legacy BIOS code from the PC that used cylinder, head, and sector addressing instead of logical block addressing (LBA). Without LBA, the first track is reserved for the boot code, and the first partition starts at cylinder 0, head 1, and sector 1. This is LBA 63 and is therefore unaligned.

An unaligned partition results in a track crossing and an additional I/O, incurring a penalty on latency and throughput. The additional I/O (especially if small) can impact system resources significantly on some host types. An aligned partitions ensures that the single I/O is serviced by a single device, eliminating the additional I/O and resulting in overall performance improvement.

This link has a really pretty graphic if you're into that:

Guest OS Partition Alignment | VMware vSphere Blog - VMware Blogs

[ericgearhart]

Can you possibly pull the OVF into VMware converter and then deploy it from there? I thought VMware Converter had some alignment functionality built into it.

[plim01]

Hi Egearhart,

Thanks for clarify my question. and yes i have think about using converter to do it, but there is no alignment functionality built into it. I have try to use the alignment tool from VMware/NETAPP, but than the panorama VM will not start anymore.

[SabreAce33]

This was a problem for us as well.  PA was unable to offer any useful assistance, unfortunately.  We ended up having to use an NFS share.